When I was in my early tweenties my older brother bought a C-Band satellite dish. This thing was cool, and huge. We could get the network feeds direct from the networks just like the local television stations did.
That meant we seen the "behind the scenes" of the so called news, as well as being able to avoid advertising. There were some real eye openers for us back then. When we thought the world was real.....
The year was 1992, Bill Clinton was running for president along with the help of his buddies in the CIA. I had a Commodore Personal Computer with a 28k baud modem, and being able to access various BBS services was the closest things we had to an internet.
If you haven't seen this video it's well worth a look. Things are not exactly the same today, they are even worse. But is this how it started ?
God Bless...